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Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.
How do we measure energy and power?
If you would like to quantitatively understand the relationship between your lifestyle, global energy use, and climate change, you need to establish the language with which you can translate between these things. There are many different ways we use energy, many different ways we produce energy, and many different consequences environmentally. Power and energy are being measured around us all of the time. You get your electricity bill in kilowatt hours (kWh), your gas bill in Therms or British Thermal Units (BTUs), your car's performance is measured in horsepower, and your lightbulbs are rated in watts. To compare these things you need a common set of units, and we've already encountered 4 different units (kWh, BTU, Hp, W), and two different concepts - energy and power -- and we've only just started.
The first problem with comparing these things is that some of them (BTUs and kWh) are measures of energy consumed, and some of them (horsepower and watts) are measures of power. To add to this confusion, some of them are measures of primary energy (barrels of oil equivalent, or metric tons of coal), some are measures of net electrical power at your outlet (W), some are measures of thermal energy or heat, and some are measures of net mechanical power (Hp at the wheels of your car). To wade your way through all of this, you need an intuition for the difference between energy, and power. Energy can actually be an abstract concept, while people often have a more intuitive understanding of power-- "my car has 200 horsepower!?
Energy is required to do work. Work is the exertion of a force over some distance. You perform work on an apple when you lift it from the ground to a table. It takes roughly 1 joule of energy to lift an apple from the ground to the table. It takes 1 watt (1 joule / second) to lift that apple from the ground to the table in one second. Energy is the measure of how much work can be done, whether it be moving apples, heating your house, or driving your car. You transform energy from one form to another when you do work. For example, you convert the chemical energy contained within gasoline to mechanical energy of rotating the crankshaft when it is burnt in an internal combustion engine. The energy that doesn't make it to the crankshaft is converted to heat. That's why your engine gets hot.
Power is the rate at which you consume energy or do work. Lifting the apple onto the table quickly requires more power than doing it slowly, but the same amount of work is performed. A more powerful car engine can accelerate you to 65 mph faster than an engine with less power, but they both get you to 65mph.
If I were powering the laptop I was writing this on by lifting apples from the floor to the table, I'd have to be lifting a crate of 40 apples every second to do so. That's quite a lot of work. Energy is a quantity, whereas power is a rate.
Quantitative comparison of aspects of your life (or 7 billion peoples' collective lives) could be made in terms of energy or power (or even carbon). If you use energy, you are bound to ask questions about the time period: is it the amount of energy in a month? Or over a lifetime? It was those questions that convinced me to start thinking in terms of power rather than energy. The rate at which your lifestyle uses energy is a convenient measure that gives you a single number to think about your energy use, power consumption, and ultimately environmental impact.
But having decided to talk about power, we still needed to decide upon the right units to talk in. Should it be kilowatt hours per day? Horsepower? BTUs per month? Watts? Kilowatt hours per day measure the use of electricity well. Horsepower measures the use of mechanical power well. BTUs per month describe the use of heat well. Watts, however, are universal, and are in fact the scientific standard as defined by the Système Internationale, so we decided to use them to measure our lives. Even though I'm talking in Watts, you'll still need to think occasionally about energy, especially in the embodied energy of objects. It isn't easy, but it is necessary. At least we are down to only two units, and they are fundamental: Watts (Power - rate), and Joules (Energy - quantity).
Trying to understand the global energy system requires understanding power use on many different scales. Billions of people each use thousands of watts of power, and the way they use that power and get that power varies enormously. It's very difficult to have an intuition or understanding of all these different units and numbers. We all have a rough understanding of the amount of power in a light bulb. We have a sense of the power of an automobile. We speak of powerful winds. Many people have stood at the side of Hoover Dam or Niagara Falls and have been awed by the raw power in front of them.
Wikipedia nicely lays out the power consumption of various activities at different orders of magnitude.
Wikipedia provides examples of the energy required to do different things at different scales.
This Wikipedia page contains an excellent converter between various energy and power units.
Now, everyone else talks about "Carbon Footprint." Carbon dioxide is the problem, isn't it? If so, why am I talking about energy and power, joules and watts, instead of CO2 and PPM?
The best answer to this is that calculating their "carbon footprint" merely makes people want to reduce their carbon footprint. Yes, the carbon is a problem, but let's imagine that it wasn't (perhaps even wish that it wasn't!). Calculating my lifestyle in 2007 on Wattzon, I needed 18kw of power. If 6.6 billion people used that much energy, the world would use more than 100TW. Global world energy production currently is 15-18TW. It is extremely unlikely that we are going to be able to make more than 100TW of power, fossil-fuel-based, green, nuclear, or otherwise. On top of reducing carbon footprint, people are going to have to simply use less energy -- hopefully while improving their lives.
As I'll explain later, the production of non-carbon emitting energy, say by using solar panels, requires a very large area of land. By talking about power instead of carbon, we will help you understand the trade-offs of all the various methods of producing humanity's power -- even the renewable energy hopefuls aren't perfect. If there is a not so subtle subtext to my blog posts, it is that the energy challenge is a game of trade-offs and compromises. It's actually a design problem; the analogy I like to use is that we are designing the garden that is earth, and we are choosing where to put the rose beds, the organic veggies, the compost heap, and the irrigation system. The choices we make in the design will effect the quality of the garden, and its variety.
There's another, less obvious reason why I talk about power instead of carbon. The carbon footprint thing leads to a shell game: "I drive a lot, so I have a large footprint. I buy an electric car so now I've reduced my footprint." Well, maybe ... it depends on where the energy came from and how big your electric car is. If you got the power from a coal power plant and it is an electric SUV, you are still using about the same amount of power and producing about the same amount of CO2. If you drive a 6000lb SUV at 75 mph, you're going to burn a lot of energy. (This is also ignoring the embodied energy required to build your shiny new electric car). The hope is that if you do your accounting in energy and power, then there's a better chance of being grounded in a number that's not process-based and so doesn't tempt you just to switch the process (eg. from gas in your tank to coal at a power station). We'd like to inspire people to solve this problem by making intelligent consumer choices, not trying to buy things to solve the problem that ultimately exacerbate it. The solution is as much about more efficient and lower-energy ways of doing things as it is about making carbon-free power.
For reference, here is a table of the amount of CO2 produced making 1 million joules (1 MJ) from different processes:
Natural Gas - 53 g/MJ
diesel - 69 g/MJ
gasoline (petrol) - 67 g/MJ
coal - 83 g/MJ
These emission ?gures are taken from DEFRA's Environmental Reporting Guidelines for Company Reporting on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
This Wikipedia page contains an excellent converter between various energy and power units.
To begin estimating your own power consumption, you can use Wattzon.
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Here's Sophie Madeleine (aka Balls of the Rocky and Balls duo) playing Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's All Right" on the ukulele.
Fra Fondi, of HobbyMedia, sent us a link to this video, part 1 of a report on the recent Make: Tokyo gathering. The vid is in Japanese, but still fascinating to watch.
We get Dale Dougherty and Phil Torrone, they get a dude dressed up as a cowboy! I feel cheated.
More:
Photos from Make: Tokyo Fall 2009
Charlie Todd says: "For our latest mission, Agent Lathan pretended to get lost during a Knicks game. Throughout the second half he kept appearing further and further away from his assigned seat with a confused look on his face." After a while, a bunch of people started calling out to Rob.
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Without the safe passage of the bill -- requiring ISPs to take firm measures against unauthorised filesharers who are currently streaming and downloading with virtual impunity -- the marker that this is theft isn't even set down, educating consumers cannot begin in earnest, businesses cannot begin to develop new models because the market won't be functioning properly and, most importantly of all, the current levels of investment that create jobs as well as talent will be lost. And that is when the real cost of digital theft would become apparent.And yet, even as he writes those words, the creative industries that he insists are dying have been growing. How? Because the business models have been adapting just fine -- even without additional artificial barriers to competition or the ability to kick people off the internet. And, in the case of the Premier League, Scudamore seems to be leaving out an awful lot of important facts, such as how incredibly limited an online offering the Premier League has put forth, which is a large part of the reason why lots of people stream it illegally. He also tosses out some totally made up "facts" such as "the UK leads the world in illegal downloads of TV programmes, with up to 25% of all online TV piracy taking place here." Well, perhaps it's not totally made up since he uses the magic words "up to." But if there is a problem with file sharing of TV shows in the UK, it's likely (as Jeff noted in his submission) because the "creative industries" that Scudamore insists are so important still delay the release of popular shows in the UK and demand that online streaming sites like Hulu not work outside the US.
Apparently inspired by BBC's The Young Ones, Instructables user lemonie put together a tutorial on how to make your own VHS toaster oven. He includes the following amusing note about safety:
If I thought anyone would attempt this (and they shouldn't) I'd offer the following warnings:Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Instructables | Digg this!
Ensure the metal parts are earthed (I did)
Do not place it on heat-sensitive surfaces.
Do not place heat-sensitive materials on top of it.
Take care not to touch any hot surfaces.
Do not leave the machine unattended.
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Our pals at Watchismo, purveyors of fine timepieces, have a competition for Boing Boing readers. "The Ray," a gorgeous retro wristwatch that costs $450, will be shipped to one entrant free of charge. All you have to do is give 'em an email address. And for everyone who doesn't win, there's a discount promo code in it just for signing up. Good luck!
Enter the draw
As Sean Bonner tweeted over the weekend, this may well be the best 17 seconds of your life.
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Regular laptop stand too boring for your taste? Check out the monster monster notebook stand instead. These are already pretty neat, but I think they would be 200% more awesome if the legs actually moved, turning the laptop into a creepy monster robot. Anyone want to get on that? [via technabob]
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These focus on "effective enforcement procedures" with expeditious remedies that deter further infringement. The wording is similar to TRIPs Article 41, however, the EU notes that unlike the international treaty provisions, there is no statement that procedures shall be fair, equitable, and/or proportionate. In other words, it seeks to remove some of the balance in the earlier treaties.This is the sort of thing that you really have to watch out for in these types of agreements. The lobbyists for the entertainment industry are amazingly good at carefully selecting or omitting words that, to the casual observer, don't seem all that important. However, in the long-term, they can change the entire thrust of an agreement. By leaving out the requirement that enforcement be "fair, equitable and/or proportionate," it makes it much easier for the industry to push for more and more draconian enforcement measures under a typical game of leapfrog or "ratcheting," where they focus on getting one country that's agreed to ACTA to impose something draconian, and then insisting that everyone else has to follow through in the name of "harmonization." Be aware of these sorts of tricks as the Hollywood lawyers will waste little time in leaping forward with claims that these rules really aren't any different than what's already in place. Of course, if that were actually the case, they wouldn't be arguing so hard for these new rules. They know how to work the system.
Royal Society's Trailblazing (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)Leading scientists and historians have chosen 60 articles from amongst the 60,000 published since the journal first began in 1665. Trailblazing will make the original manuscripts available online for the first time alongside fascinating insights from modern-day experts who are continuing the work of scientific giants such as Newton, Hooke, Faraday and Franklin and making vital new breakthroughs of their own in areas such as genetics, physics, climate change and medicine.
Highlights include:
• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)
• Captain James Cook's explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)
• Stephen Hawking's early writing on black holes (1970)
• Benjamin Franklin's account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning - the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)
• Sir Isaac Newton's landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)
• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)
• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)
Image: "Frontispeice to Thomas Sprat's A History of the Royal Society (1667)"
Frank Sinatra by Drew FriedmanThis portrait of Frank Sinatra by Drew Friedman captures the Chairman of the Board during the 1950s, when his persona defined sophisticated swinging. Frank knew how to hold a note, his liquor, and a dame. In button-down mainstream America, Sinatra oozed free 'n easy; on the opposite side of the cultural divide, Ol' Blue Eyes didn't have to behave like a beatnik to convey cool....
Sinatra performed with the élan of an artist who had no serious competitors. The nonchalant gestures never undercut the passion in The Voice, and his smooth delivery always hinted at power in reserve. Ten years after Frank's passing, his recordings continue to enchant old fans and seduce new ones. A personality larger than life, a legacy bigger than death. "Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant," he claimed. "When I sing, I believe. I'm honest."
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Vagina mints (Via Sociological Images)A little digging revealed that Linger is made/distributed by a company called Admints, which just happens to make trade show mints. And the Linger samples just happen to have have the exact same shape, taste, and ingredients as Admint’s sample mints. So how does Linger manage to pass off breath mints as vaginal Tic Tacs in $7.99 packs? Despite the salacious creation story and testimonials on its site (”It gets a little warm as it starts to dissolve which took just under an hour. Then, it is SO good!!”), the mint is labeled “for novelty use only.” This is a common practice in the sex-products industry, explains Charlie Glickman, the education program manager at Good Vibrations. It gives manufacturers some cover if something goes awry, he explains. “They could say, ‘It’s just a novelty toy. You weren’t actually expecting to use this were you?’” And if you actually do expect to use Linger to “flavor the woman in a manner that is safe and effective,” be warned: its primary ingredient is sugar, which is not safe for the vagina. It messes up the pH and can lead to a really painful yeast infection, a condition that definitely doesn’t make someone want to “linger.”
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Taken from RYTC's photo of a billboard. There are currently four minarets in all of Switzerland, each pointed threateningly at (from?) one quarter of the nation. The poster's minarets resemble those of the Hagia Sophia, a nice touch given the mindset at hand. The eyes, however, resemble those of David Bowie, emerging from some very serious moonlight. Previously.
Keith Phipps assembled a list of "17 particularly peculiar Beach Boys songs." They may be peculiar, but they're also a lot of fun to listen to.
(Via Michel Leddy, who asks "how could he have left out “I’m Bugged at My Old Man”?)
I would like this.
I love the electronics videos Collin Cunningham produces for Make: Online. Not only does he describe his projects in an entertaining way, he also scores the trippy music for them.
After checking out a few projects involving IR heart monitors, I decided to have a go at the interface myself. Seen above are the results of my first experimentation with pulse oximetry. Getting the setup up and running satisfactorily required a bit more time and tinkering than I'd expected - especially after reversing a premature mod to my emitter/detector pair. The next version I try will either use a higher output emitter (see Charles Martin's version) or some amplification hardware (as used in Meng Li's sensor).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Mass. Woman Sees Image Of Jesus On Her Iron"The 44-year-old Coady was raised Catholic. She and her two college-age daughters agree that the image looks like Jesus and is proof that "he's listening."
Coady tells The Eagle-Tribune she hopes her story will inspire others during the holidays. She says she plans to keep the iron in a closet and buy a new one.
The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy. There were two al Quaeda operatives at St Paul's that day: the cop and her sidekick, who were about Osama bin Laden's business in London all day long.
BBC photographer on being stopped by police (Thanks, Graham!)
(Image: St Paul's, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Kieran Lynam's Flickr stream)
Photo:Rayphua
I know what you're thinking! "How is that a success? You lost all your traffic and only gained a handful of paying customers!"
It was a success because the Hobbs News Sun's website went from losing money—it generated no revenue and occupied employees for hours each day—to making enough money to sustain itself.
This isn't a counter-argument to what we often write about here: for major publishers, paywalls represent a desperate floundering in the face of death. But recognizing why it's good for some throws light on why it's bad for most. And here's why it was good for us:
• We made negligible ad revenue from the website. Traffic was too low for affiliate schemes or adsense to make any money. The local advertisers had no imagination, and it was difficult to convince ad sales staff to push it on them. While we were going from nothing to something, today's big publishers are trying to maintain something they already have.
• Readers had no-where else to go for professional local journalism. The Lea County Tribune fills the "happy society page" niche that newspapers often ignore, but that's it. Even the radio stations would often just read our stories on the air. Bottom line: no-one else is doing written reporting there. There weren't even any local bloggers doing their own thing.
• The paper's small size meant we could get away with using PDF files. We used them because PDF qualifies as paid circulation with the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which means online views counted for advertising purposes just like selling copies of the print edition.
The critical point here is that advertising is still what makes money for news, even when there's a cover charge. Paywalls aren't just sold to readers. They must be sold to advertisers. Paid walls make the eyeballs behind them much more valuable.
To succeed with paywalls, then, publishers need not only an established monopoly on something valuable (local news, scoops, reporting quality) but also a plan to translate that into advertiser interest. Paywalls alone, unless they are ridiculously expensive, just won't be enough.
(There were, however, other reasons to erect a paywall at the News-Sun. For example, legal counsel convinced it not to permit the essential ingredient of a successful website: user-contributed content. The reason given was that the potential liabilities involved haven't been settled by a definitive SCOTUS ruling. Which is absolutely true, of course. Just as it is true that the risk of exploring the pyramids hasn't been conclusively settled until we've proven that we won't be attacked there by golden unicorns.)
It'll eventually be time for the News-Sun to do something fancier than plain-jane paywall PDF. But if that's still paying its way, why bother? Publishers can make a go of paywalls as long as advertisers and readers have few options and they can maintain the status quo.
Which would, of course, count out just about almost all of the major publishers currently thinking of implementing one.
TV commercial from another time. (What is the music playing in the background?) (Via Bedazzled!)
The room is pitch black. There is absolutely no light in here, not even an emergency exit or the glow of a cell phone. I can't see anything. A slight panic flickers through my mind. For the next three hours, I will have to rely on my other senses to figure everything out.
I'm at Opaque, a fancy restaurant in San Francisco in which patrons dine in perfect darkness. Actually, I don't really know if it's fancy — the staff members are polite and the tablecloth feels expensive, but for all I know the room is a basement dungeon and my steak is green. In addition to offering a tasty five-course prix fixe menu, Opaque forces us to live without our vision for a few hours — most of us rely on the sense of sight heavily during our daily lives, and we don't really know what it's like to not be able to see at thing. Mocha, our waitress, is legally blind. She has leber congenital amaurosis, a genetic retinal disease that causes her to see giant blotches of blind spots all across her field of vision — she can see basic shapes, but she can't read or drive. Having lived with this all her life, she's a pro at maneuvering through the darkness — once my date for the night, Julio, and I pick our food choices from a menu in a dimly lit lounge, she slips through a curtain and marches through the pitch darkness with my arm on her shoulder, forewarning me of a right turn ahead, then a slight left, until we reach the table.
There are very few places in the world where one can experience pure, complete blackness, and this is one of them. My eyes desperately scan the space for something they can see. I can feel my pupils dilating and my mind going wild with desperation. After a few minutes, my brain finally registers the futility of this hunt, and I close my eyes. I hear two people talking softly in the distance. My nose takes in the faint mustiness of the room. My fingers scan the table in front of me with my fingers. I realize that my other senses are stepping up to compensate for the absence of vision.
Mocha explains a few simple rules. Right now, there are two forks, a knife, and a napkin on the table, and nothing else. I am to meet her hands at the angled corner to exchange plates of food. The Pellegrino is straight in front of me; she recommends sticking my finger in my glass while pouring to prevent overflow. Eating in the dark can be a bit messy — I think I got more butter on my pinkie than I did on the bread.
For dinner, I have a salmon amuse-bouche, ahi tuna tartare with crispy wontons, a crudite plate with three kinds of veggies and dips, beef tenderloin with mashed potatoes, and chocolate cake. The whole meal costs $79, not including drinks.
Midway through the meal, I decide to take a bathroom break to wash my butter-covered hands. Mocha puts my hand on her shoulder and leads me back out through the curtains into the light. The bathroom is in the building next door. It's nighttime, but the streetlights look offensively bright. I realize in a new way how messy the visual world is — trash all over the street, people flailing their arms wildly as they talk, wine bottles stacked one over another on a huge wall rack, paper towels tossed messily into the bathroom trash can. I can't wait to get back into the peace and darkness.
Mocha tells me that some people come here to party but most come to make out. For me, what's hitting this whole experience out of the ballpark is the way I am really just tasting the food I'm shoving in my mouth for what seems like the first time in my life. It's like every single ingredient is self-separating inside of my mouth for a very detailed taste check.
By the time dessert comes, I'm feeling relaxed, peaceful, and at ease. I'm wearing a dress, but I sit back in the booth with my legs wide open, aware that nobody can see me so it doesn't even matter. I make funny faces at Julio just for kicks, because I know he can't see.
I manage to get through the entire meal without spilling anything... well, almost. Feeling confident and a little bit sleepy, I order coffee after dessert — I thought I would be able to hear the cream pouring, but apparently I didn't because I got it all over my fingers when I picked up the cup, and my coffee tasted like milk.
It's nearly 11PM when Julio and I emerge from the darkness. As we run across the dirty street avoiding the glaring headlights of cars passing by, we realize both how grateful we are for our vision and how nice it was not to have to see anything for the past three hours.
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Erik of Afrigadget found these cute bags made out of coconuts on Lamu Island, off the coast of Kenya, while traveling with his daughter. As he points out, it's one example of a great way for locals to make money from tourists using local resources that might otherwise become garbage.
Coconut + Zippers = Handbags
Need to generate a high-quality sine wave using an Arduino? The folks over at Lab3 explain how it's done with their Arduino DDS Sinewave Generator. Using direct digital synthesis and a Chebyshev filter, they claim that the system can produce sine waves from 0 to 16 KHz, with distortion less than 1% for frequencies lower than 3KHz.
So that is all well and good, but what is it good for? It turns out that they are using it to participate in WSPRnet, an amateur radio study of how well radio signals can propagate across the earth at any given time. Personally, I'm thinking about hooking one up to some speakers to see what kinds of sound I can create.
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The CrunchPad, named Popular Mechanic's 10 most brilliant products of the year (although it never came out) is not happening. Mike writes -
The entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication... I'm enraged, embarrassed, and just...sad.
I bet there's more to this story... Here's what Ladyada who makes hardware thinks...
Although it may seem like an irrelevant point, I'm guessing the price was a big contributor to the project death. Why? because when you say up front (with no experience in hardware/manufacturing design) that you're going to sell it for $x the scramble then becomes "how can each party squeeze margin out?" When theres very little margin, parties are more willing to bluff knowing that they can walk away and there was almost no $ on the table. Hardware has this problem, and I've seen it so many times, that the founder prices the hardware at only a bit (say ~30%) above the parts cost, not realizing the tons of NRE expenses, ballooning BOM, contractor costs, and the hundreds of other ways the price can easily double. Then they're stuck: the investors/contract manufacturer/designer/customer hates them. That leads to abandonment. Please please please, if you decide to do any kind of hardware, add an extra 40% margin on top of whatever you pick. If you don't need it, you can always cut the price later! :)
When there was a lot of buzz about the CrunchPad everyone many curious gadget fans asked me about their "open source" and "open source hardware" tablet. I wasn't sure if it was going to happen, it's expensive, margins are tough, doing hardware is hard. A lot of web commenters said "exactly, this is so easy now" just get some screens, load up linux and have it boot in to a browser, DONE! I was worried that they were saying "open source" just to get good will and support, this happens a lot.
Here's what was said...
In the founding July 21, 2008 manifesto "We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. Michael Arrington wrote: "So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them." "If everything works well, we’d then open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to."
On the "The End Of The CrunchPad" post Mike writes...
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
This sounds like it's in a good spot to open up the designs right? So as a follow up I've asked if they're going to stick to what they said. I'm hoping they publish something.
I posted my question on TechCrunch (it's either in moderation or deleted?)...
mike - phil from MAKE magazine here. you said many times that the project was an open source project (the hardware and the software) - where are the files, the schematics, the source code, the PCB files, etc? is it correct to assume that "fusion garage" is not going to release any source or continue this project as an open source (software/hardware project)? if that's the case it seems like "open source" was used again just to get good will and marketing and not really put any value in.
Post your thoughts in the comments!
Surf brand Quiksilver got together with skater Tony Hawk and Paris design collective Fandango to create a neat, very well-designed installation called I was a teenager in the.... It's basically a series of bedrooms that reflect each decade of surf culture.
via Dezeen
Image by Chi Chi Mendez
After checking out a few projects involving IR heart monitors, I decided to have a go at the interface myself. Seen above are the results of my first experimentation with pulse oximetry. Getting the setup up and running satisfactorily required a bit more time and tinkering than I'd expected - especially after reversing a premature mod to my emitter/detector pair. The next version I try will either use a higher output emitter (see Charles Martin's version) or
some amplification hardware (as used in Meng Li's sensor).
Download the m4v file or subscribe in iTunes
Related:
Heartbeat MIDI controller
MAKE subscriber Dan Wagoner points out this well-executed remake of Biegert & Funk's Qlock2 - a clock that displays the time in conversational sentence format. Flickr member Ruud Burger gives a quick rundown of his project -
Remake of the QlockTwo by Biegert & Funk. Using an Arduino Mega Clone + DCF77 module to get the time. No buttons needed, just plugin and wait a minute or 2 and it will set the time for you. This is my first project using an Arduino, or any electronics for that matter. Code can be found at: sht.tl/GB, I never planned of releasing it, so don't expect good code-comments etc. EPS of the vinyl sticker can be found at: sht.tl/p0
Definitely a nice addition to any modern home decor - I'm guessing an English-language remake can't be far behind. Have a closer look at the QlockTwo Remake on Flickr
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Scientific American talks evidence, digging into seven arguments against the reality of climate change that, if not the most frequently-cited in general, are certainly the most frequently cited in BoingBoing comment threads. Personally, I've started trying to avoid the snarky, dismissive tone this piece veers a bit into...I just don't think it helps anything to make the honest skeptics feel mocked. (The oil lobbyists, the anti-semetic conspiracy nuts, etc. can be easily and freely mocked on an individual basis.) But that aside, the article is worth reading. Good answers given for:
Scientific American: Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense
Although it can't be a terribly accurate way to make polycube puzzle pieces, I must admit I am charmed by Qiao Chang's origami soma cube blocks. [via Neatorama]
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Bertie (via Superpunch)
Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic (via /.)Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces--from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age groups, and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e., kinship or "homophily").
(Image: Guild Wars, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from dalvenjah's Flickr stream)
EU ACTA Analysis Leaks: Confirms Plans For Global DMCA, Encourage 3 Strikes Model (Thanks, Michael!)
Guatemala's Lake Atitlán, surrounded by volcanoes and Maya settlements, has been taken over by a massive bloom of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). I'll be traveling to a K'iche' Maya village not far from this place in a couple of weeks. The image comes from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite.
It's no shock to realize that decades of environmental damage have led to this, but it is still very weird to see an image that shows this huge, seemingly pristine body of water transformed into a big pool of slime, with growing "dead zones" where fish and other critters can no longer survive. Guatemala is facing a widespread hunger crisis already -- so, for the at-risk human populations around the lake who live off a subsistence farmer/fisher lifestyle, this means more hunger, more death.
Cyanobacteria are a serious problem both because they are toxic to humans and other animals and because they create dead zones. As the bacteria multiply, they form a thick mat that blocks sunlight. Dense blooms can also consume all of the oxygen in the water, leaving a dead zone where other plants and animals cannot survive. The density of the bloom also affects the cyanobacteria. Since only the top layer of the bloom receives life-sustaining light, the bacteria in the rest of the bloom die and decay, releasing toxins into the water. These highly toxic harmful algal blooms cause illness in people and other animals.The Guatemalan government says it will cost 32 million dollars to "clean up the lake, install water treatment plants, and implement other measures to limit the flow of pollution into the lake to prevent future outbreaks." Knowing how things work in the country, all I can say is -- don't hold your breath on that one. This is terrible, tragic news.
Turkey tests new means of Internet control (Thanks, Evgeny!)
(Image: CAMERA ISTANBUL, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Material Boy's Flickr stream)
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From the "Cute Animals Devouring Other Cute Animals" file, I bring you this BBC video showing a mob of starfish ravaging the carcass of a seal pup. (That starfish covered mound in the picture? Seal pup.) Granted, they do this very, very slowly. The video speeds things up with time-lapse photography, which only adds to the alien creepiness as you watch thousands of starfish (plus sea urchins and giant meat-eating worms) damn-near gallop across the ocean floor.
How do starfish eat a seal? Glad you asked. Turns out, they latch onto the seal's side, pop their stomachs out through their mouths, dump digestive juices onto the seal flesh and then slurp up the dissolved "soup". Happy Monday.
Oh, and beware the scene at about 1:50 into the clip. It's a little, erm, not cute. Nature, red in tooth and claw, and all that. Fair warning.
BBC Life: Timelapse Of Swarming Monster Worms and Seastars
Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security (via Schneier)
This illustrates something important. Many people feel that they are wise to certain scams or take steps to protect their property; but, often, these steps don't go far enough. A con artist can easily answer people's concerns or provide all sorts of proof to put minds at ease. In order to protect oneself, it's essential to remove all possibility of compromise. There's no point parking your own car if you then give the valet your keys. Despite this, the mark felt more secure when, in actual fact, he had made the hustler's job easier.......Much of systems security boils down to "allowing certain principals to perform certain actions on the system while disallowing anyone else from doing them"; as such, it relies implicitly on some form of authentication--recognizing which principals should be authorized and which ones shouldn't. The lesson for the security engineer is that the security of the whole system often relies on the users also performing some authentication, and that they may be deceived too, in ways that are qualitatively differ- ent from those in which computer systems can be deceived. In online banking, for example, the role of verifier is not just for the web site (which clearly must authenticate its customers): to some extent, the customers themselves should also authenticate the web site before entering their credentials, otherwise they might be phished. However it is not enough just to make it "technically possible"18 : it must also be humanly doable by non-techies. How many banking customers check (or even understand the meaning of) the https padlock?19
Makers (Cory Doctorow):
Technology lets low-cost providers take market share away from established companies, as Detroit auto makers and Paris fashion house designers have seen. Even high-tech companies have a hard time building sustainable businesses now that good ideas are copied so quickly that they become commodities.
In a time of great change, fiction can sometimes provide better understanding than facts alone. "As the pace of technological change accelerates, the job of the science fiction writer becomes not harder, but easier--and more necessary," he writes. "After all, the more confused we are by our contemporary technology, the more opportunities there are to tell stories that lessen that confusion."
L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal
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The Strain: Book One
of The Strain Trilogy Someone said The Strain is a
combination of The Stand, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, and I am Legend, which I'd say is a pretty
fair way of describing it. The first chapter is about an airplane that
lands at JFK from Germany and goes completely dark on the runway. It's
so creepy that when I told my wife and daughter about it *they* got
creeped out just from my description.
Full
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<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/world-made-by-hand-tb.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left"> World Made by
Hand In the sweet and sad novel, World Made By Hand by James
Howard Kunstler, the population of the United States (and most likely,
the world) has been decimated by an energy shortage, starvation,
plagues, terrorism, and global warming. The story takes place in an
unspecified time in the near future (I'm guessing it's around 2025 or
so).
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Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett):
Here's the setup: the wizards of Unseen University have discovered that a key grant from a former Archchancellor requires them to keep a football team that plays regular matches. It's been decades since the last UU team was fielded, and they're in imminent danger of losing a substantial source of funding. Meanwhile, football itself -- as played on the streets of Ankh-Morpork -- is a vicious game that is more riot than sport, and the wizards of UU have no intention of getting involved in that mess.
Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book: A Primer for Adults Only (Shel Silverstein):
R is for Red: The fire is red, the fire engine is red, the fireman's hat is red... Too bad the fireman only goes to places WHERE THERE IS A FIRE.
T is for TV: See the nice TV. The TV is warm... The TV loves you. Do you know that there are little elves who live inside the TV? ...If you take Daddy's hammer and break open the TV you will see the funny little elves. What will you name them?
The Caryatids (Bruce Sterling):
In The Caryatids, global warming has melted practically every government in the world (except China) -- leaving behind a slurry of refugees, rising seas, and inconceivable misery. But there are two stable monoliths sticking out of the chaos, a pair of "civil society groups" that embody the two major schools of smart green thought today: the Dispensation are Al Gore green capitalists based out of California who understand that glamor and profits, properly aimed, achieve more than any amount of stern determination and chaste conservation; their rivals are the Aquis, mostly European anarcho-techno-geeks who have abandoned money in favor of technologically mediated communal life where giant, powerful, barely controlled machines are deployed to save the refugees and heal the Earth.
Shatnerquake (Jeff Burk):
It's the first ShatnerCon with William Shatner as the guest of honor! But after a failed terrorist attack by Campbellians, a crazy terrorist cult that worships Bruce Campbell, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.
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Sandman Slim (Richard Kadrey):
Eleven years ago, James Stark was banished to hell by his circle of magic buddies, betrayed by his supposed friends for the crime of being a better magician than them. For eleven years, he's suffered hell's torments as Azazel's mortal slave, first made to fight in the pits and then turned into an assassin. And now he's escaped hell by stabbing himself in the heart with a key that opens every lock, and he's returned to Los Angeles to seek his vengeance on the magicians who betrayed him. He hunts them across a demon-infested Los Angeles, dishing out and receiving relentless, graphic violence, determined to take his revenge and then die and leave the Earth behind forever.
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! (Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith):
Here's the pitch: Seth Grahame-Smith has taken Jane Austen's classic, beloved novel Pride and Prejudice and, by means of cunning textual insertions and deletions, changed the story so that it takes place in the midst of a Regency England that has been plunged into chaos by a plague of the living dead. It takes surprisingly little work to do this, and the book ends up feeling substantially like the classic mannered novel that so many adore. Except with zombie mayhem. The execution is flawless, often hilarious, and just plain clever.
Mind Over Ship (David Marusek):
Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model-ee's consent) and a thousand other fragments. Each of these factions battles for the best deal it can get -- even as the individual members of each clade fight for their own personal best interests.
Leviathan (Scott Westerfeld):
Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are divided into "Clankers" who favour huge, steam-powered walking war-machines; and "Darwinists," whose hybrid "beasties" can stand in for airships, steam-trains, war-ships, and subs (they even have a giant squid/octopus hybrid called the kraken that can seize whole warships and drag them to their watery graves).
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (Robert Charles Wilson):
Julian is the story of a world sunk into feudal barbarism, 150 years after Peak Oil, plagues, economic collapse and war left the planet in tatters. Now, America (grown to encompass most of Canada, save for deeply entrenched Dutch and "mitteleuropean" forces in the now-verdant Labrador) is ruled over by a mad hereditary president, whose power is buoyed up by the Dominion, a religious authority that represents the true power in a nation where the new First Amendment guarantees the right to worship at any sanctioned church of your choosing.
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Ariel (Steven R Boyett):
I first read Steven R Boyett's novel Ariel in 1983: I was twelve years old, and I was absolutely, totally hooked.
Here's the premise: one day at 4:30 PM, the world Changes. Complex technology (anything beyond a simple machine) stops working. Magic starts working. Planes fall out of the sky, dragons take wing. Chaos wracks the world. Riots. Starvation. Murder.
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Cyberabad Days (Ian McDonald):
In Cyberabad Days, seven stories (one a Hugo winner, another a Hugo nominee) McDonald performs the quintessential science fictional magic trick: imagining massive technological change and making it intensely personal by telling the stories of real, vividly realized people who leap off the page and into our minds. And he does this with a deft prose that is half-poetic, conjuring up the rhythms and taste and smells of his places and people, so that you are really, truly transported into these unimaginably weird worlds. McDonald's India research is prodigious, but it's nothing to the fabulous future he imagines arising from today's reality.
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Boneshaker (Cherie Priest):
Cherie Priest's zombie steampunk mad-science dungeon crawl family adventure novel Boneshaker is everything you'd want in such a volume and much more.
Enemy of Chaos (Leila Johnston):
Leila Johnston's Enemy of Chaos is a geekily hilarious modern choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you play a middle aged bitter geek who is drafted into a branching narrative in which your goal is to save reality, while negotiating many of the familiar indignities of modern geekish life, from over-exuberant role-players to nuclear apocalypse.
The Magicians (Lev Grossman):
Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy, depressed, high-achieving Brooklyn kid who finds himself hijacked from his Princeton interview and whisked away to Brakebills Academy, a school of magic upstate on the Hudson. He passes the entrance exam and begins his education as a wizard.
Other installments:
Part Six: Comix, Art Books, etc
The Wolverton Bible (Basil Wolverton):
Wolverton wasn't just a funnybooks illustrator: he was also a member of a millenarian evangelical church called the Worldwide Church of God, a sect that believed in obeying Old Testament lifestyle laws and the literal truth of Revelations. So it was natural that Wolverton ended up with a regular, paid gig illustrating a series of Bible stories for kids and adults published in the Church's magazines like Plain Truth and in booklets with titles like Prophecy and The Book of Revelations, overseen by Church leader Herbert Armstrong, who had converted Wolverton to his faith.
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Norman Saunders was a
prominent illustrator for Captain Billy's Whiz Bang,
Modern Mechanics, pulp detective, western, war, and science
fiction magazines, men's adventure magazines, and bubblegum cards and
stickers, including Wacky Packages and Mars Attacks. Anyone interested
in 20th century magazine illustration pretty much has to have this
book in his or her library. I devoured the 368 technicolor pages
filled with examples of his work from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Full
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The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook (Eleanor Davis):
The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is Eleanor Davis's kids' comic glorifying science, invention, and the joys of personal exploration. Julian Calendar is a bright 11-year-old who has moved to a new school where he is determined to fit in by masking his voracious intellect, but instead he finds himself (gladly) fallen in with two other science kids -- Greta Hughes, a "bad kid" with a reputation and Ben Garza, a "dumb jock" who shines on the basketball court but chokes on tests. Both kids are, in fact, natural scientists (as is Julian), but they aren't the right kind of smart to get ahead in school.
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<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/lol-cats-tb.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Laugh Out Loud Cats
Sell Out These 150 one-panel gags, featuring a pair of
wise-foolish felines, are terrific, both in their warm, scorn-free
humor, and in their evidence of masterful craftsmanship.
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The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack (Nicholas Gurewitch):
I've you've never read The Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic, now's the time to start. Dark Horse recently published a giant omnibus of material from Nicholas Gurewitch's PBF, The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack, and it's a concentrated dose of the kind of dark, twisted humor that makes you bark with laughter and look away at the same time.
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<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/tree-show-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Mark Ryden: The Tree
Show "Ryden paints his characters with a masterful, porcelain
glow reminiscent of Ingres and renders his trees with a care that
evokes Audubon's botanical illustration. Several of his paintings are
presented in elaborately carved frames that project their narratives
beyond the canvas."
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The Best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 A.D. (Ryan North):
Dinosaur Comics is an unlikely gem of a webcomic -- the same six panels every week featuring three dinosaurs and a house, a car and a woman in danger of being smushed. What changes from strip to strip is the dialog, and man, there's a lot of it.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/secret-ID-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Secret Identity: The
Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster showcases
rare and recently discovered erotic artwork by the most seminal artist
in comics, Joe Shuster. Created in the early 1950s when Shuster was
down on his luck after suing his publisher, DC Comics, over the
copyright for Superman, he illustrated these images for an obscure
series of magazines called Nights of Horror, published under the
counter until they were banned by the U.S. Senate. Juvenile
deliquency, Dr. Fredric Wertham, and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers gang
all figure into this sensational story.
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The Beats: A Graphic History (Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, Ed Piskor):
The Beats: A Graphic History is everything a radical history should be: critical, admiring, quirky and apologetic. The Beats is largely written by Harvey Pekar and illustrated by Ed Piskor, with a concluding section of more critical, less biographical pieces written and illustrated by a variety of critics and artists, including Nancy J Peters, Tulu Kupferberg, Summer McClinton, Anne Timmons and others.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/rough-fraz-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Frank Frazetta:
Rough Work I own quite a few books about the art of Frank
Frazetta, but Rough Work just might be my favorite. It's such a treat
to see pages from his sketchbooks, as well as roughs of his most
famous illustrations. For some reason, I usually like an artist's
sketches for paintings more than the paintings themselves. They are
looser, and in Frazetta's case, brimming with vitality.
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Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Volume 1 (Michael Kupperman):
The first four issues of Michael Kupperman's awesome comedy comics zine Tales Designed to Thrizzle have been collected into a single hardcover volume that is a superdense wad of funny, surreal, bent humor, including The Buzz Aldrin Mysteries (the radio operator has been murdered, any one of the seven people on the moon could have done it!); two cowboys kicking the hell out of each other for 10 panels while shouting "I'd say comics are serious literature" and "I say they ain't"; the World Famous Apairy Hat (Girls Love it, Bears Want to Stick Their Paws In It!); a thirties nostalgia comic about an unemployed former courtroom ghost who is shrunk down and has nothing but amoebas to eat for two years; and a video game called Big City Marathon ("Keep your finger on the forward arrow key for 26 hours to win"). This is weird, funny, Subgenius-esque toilet reading that will keep you very regular.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/walkinf-dead-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Walking Dead
Omnibus Volume 2I'm ready to feed my nightmares once again.
It's a massive hardbound, slipcased anthology of the terrific Image
comic book series by Robert Kirkman about a small band of humans
struggling to live in a world filled with undead flesh eaters.
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T-Minus: The Race to the Moon:
Jim Ottaviani's new science history graphic novel, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, is a fast-paced, informative recounting of the events beginning with the launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite on Oct 4, 1957, to the first human landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.
Full review | Purchase
The Book of Genesis
Illustrated by R. Crumb "As Crumb writes in his introduction,
'the stories of these people, the Hebrews, were something more than
just stories. They were the foundation, the source, in writing of
religious and political power, handed down by God himself.' Crumb's
Book of Genesis, the culmination of 5 years of painstaking work, is a
tapestry of masterly detail and storytelling which celebrates the
astonishing diversity of the one of our greatest artistic geniuses."
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Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008 (David Rees):
Rees's minimalist, clip-art graphics combined with his profane (top marks for inspired and expressive use of the word 'fuck' -- next time an English teacher tells you cursing isn't an effective way of expressing yourself, produce this book and win the day) torrent of raging, pitiless, vicious, relentless attacks on the stupidity of the War on Terror made GET YOUR WAR ON the single consistently credible voice during the Bush Years.
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<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/sex-obsessions-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Robert Crumb's Sex
Obsessions "This signed, slipcased, limited edition of 1,000
copies is a work of art in itself, with every part of the book--case,
front and back covers, spine, introduction and pre-introduction
pages--created for this project by Robert Crumb. Each book also comes
with a print on mould-made age-resistant hahnemuehle paper pulled from
an original watercolor by Robert Crumb."
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The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century (Frank Miller):
I have Frank Miller's Give Me Liberty graphic novels to thank for getting me interested in graphic novels as a literary form. I read the first Give Me Liberty collection when I was seventeen, after having it thrust insistently into my hands by my roommate Erik Stewart. Erik judged -- correctly -- that I'd find in Miller's groundbreaking tale the same satisfaction I got from reading the best sf novels. He was so right.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/sex-and-science-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Ancient Book of Sex
and Science This collection of mid-century styled paintings
and other works of art by four obscenely talented Pixar animation
designers -- Nate Wragg, Scott Morse, Lou Romano, and Don Shank --
hearkens back to the days of the Golden science books (Like Biology,
Mathematics, and Chemistry Experiments), and the How and Why Wonder
Books, but the theme this time is sex and robots, sex and aliens, and
sex and math
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<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/parker-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Parker: The
Hunter Imagine Mad Men, with its cool stylishness, but with
characters even more depraved and rapacious, and you'll have an idea
for what's in store when you read The Hunter.
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Other installments:
Part Six: Comix, Art Books, etc
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by Eric Archer
Straight from the 1890s to the 1980s, I would like to suggest any of these fun bits of retro technology for the tinkerers, makers, and geeks on your shopping list. I've included plenty of affordable items to help you spread the good cheer. Some are kits that require assembly, others are enjoyable right out of the box.
LD40 Pink 8-digit Calculator Watch (Casio, $19.99)
CA53W-1 Twincept Databank Watch (Casio, $18.95)
Many of us remember the futuristic thrill when calculator watches hit the scene. I knew I had to have one, so I made a business deal with my dad when I was in 7th grade: I painted the entire exterior of our house in exchange for a Casio Databank watch. Although the cellphone is probably the most common calculator in use now, the wrist-calculator is far more likely to start a conversation. Casio has indeed released an entire series of affordable and retro-styled calculator watches that will take your recipient back to future.
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With just a handful of years under his game development belt, 24 year old Jonatan Söderström -- better known by his handle Cactus -- has already become something of a cult legend in indie circles, particularly for his relentless, near-manic prolificness, as illustrated above by Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho's inspirational desktop background.
And Purho's point is only half-ironic: by Cactus's own count, he released some 16 games in 2008, after nine in 2007 and another 12 the year before that. But quantity's only half the story: Söderström's oeuvre wouldn't be nearly as well regarded were it not for the fact that each is fiercely original and unmistakably his own.
But just how broad his appeal might be (given the right exposure), was put to the test when I debuted his last game, Tuning, at my Austin Game Developers Conference session earlier this year, which, as expected, created the biggest buzz of all the games shown -- I continued to field questions about "that ball game" for the rest of the week.
Tuning -- which went on to take the Sublime Experience award at Indiecade and is now in the running for the 2010 Indie Games Festival Award -- perfectly encapsulates what it is that Cactus does best. At its core, it's a game about little more than rolling a ball from point A to point B, but embellished by a series of steadily more perception-fucking filters that truly test your brain's ability to process inputs.
Below, then, is an introduction to Cactus's output from the past few years, to warm you up to the eventual release of Tuning, a game which even Keita 'Katamari Damacy' Takahashi had to concede was a worthy art-game contender.
Cactus's Mondo series -- spread across Mondo Agency and Mondo Medicals comes closest to Tuning in the way they consistently bruise both your perception and assumptions. Quasi-Lynchian in tone (both are underscored with that low-frequency industrial drone), they're simple lo-fi first-person experiments elevated by their ability to take tasks like basic navigation and turn them on their head.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is his shoot-em-up output, including Protoganda: Strings (above), and Clean Asia (below). Protoganda hook rests on its grainy 8mm Constructivist design -- the closest we'll get to understanding what El Lissitzky might've designed if he'd lived to build a game --
Where Clean Asia! is a far more mechanically complex game of attraction and repulsion done up in razor-sharp laser-vectors, and is essentially the game I'd always grown up to believe would be played off pirated boards in dirty HK back-alley arcades once the inevitable cyberpunk future had arrived.
Air Pirates
Life/Death/Island
Unfinished games
But Cactus's true signature is catching these fleeting glimpses of all the games we haven't yet had a chance to play -- as above -- which come across like leaked footage from an alternate universe of 8-bit nostalgia.
Söderström's only Achilles heel is the attention span that pushes him from one idea to the next at breakneck pace: with a proper schedule, budget, and singular focus there's no doubt he could dominate the indie sphere, but you're left wondering if the trade-off -- losing the other three games he's no doubt already finished in the time it took you to even browse this post -- is worth it.
To play nearly all the games mentioned here, visit Cactus's newly re-established website (and his more formal Lo-Fi Minds partnership), and start with the Cactus Arcade: and wonder at the notion that even those 17 of his best ideas collected into one browsable interface represents only a fraction of the man-hours put into any given single blockbuster game.
LittleBigPlanet [Sony Cambridge, PSP]
Apart from that the week's been dominated by the release of the newly downsized LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation Portable, and I can quite happily report that it's made that that fantastic voyage largely intact.
I won't reiterate here all the reasons why I think the game's been so important, as I laid that all out earlier in the week (along with a gallery of concept art), but suffice it to say that the reasons to like Media Molecule's original are largely the same reasons to like its little sister.
That comes with two caveats, though: the superficial one being that the game suffers from a distinct and tangible lack of Rexbox -- the UK illustrator who lent the original much of its CMYK sticker mad charm. The other is that after whipping through its single player levels, the strength of the game rests solely on its community, who have yet to flock to the game and populate its user-level section with as much ferocity as they did on the PS3 (even the recent contest-winning game-jam level has yet to appear).
That will surely change with time -- it is, of course, only a handful of days into the game's wider PlayStation Network digital release -- but for now it's a much more lonely experience, particularly given the late-day news that the game's multiplayer had been sacrificed for better physics simulations, with only the gently paternal coos of Stephen Fry's narration there to keep you company.
Bit.Trip Void [Gaijin, Wii]
Finally, the other best downloadable of the week is the WiiWare latest from indie dev Gaijin's retro-futurist rhythm game series Bit.Trip. It's the third we've seen this year, and probably the most accessible for the series newcomer (though there's also now a free demo version of the series premiere, Beat, to give your teeth a trial cutting).
And for the third evolution in the series (which -- as ultra-sharply observed by Fez creator Phil Fish -- can be seen as tracing the evolution of videogames themselves, from Beat's paddle-control, to Core's D-pad, to Void's now analog-/joy-stick controls), it's surprisingly minimalist.
Where Pong asked simply that you Avoid Missing Ball For High Score, Void only slightly modifies that to a "Avoid Missing Black Balls, Definitely Avoid The White" duality. That lays the groundwork for an austere but powerfully raw risk/reward mechanic in which you grow your Void with every black dot, but have to then more delicately dance in between the whites -- touching the whites instantly deflates the Void, but keeping it engorged and manually emptying it at the last second before a tragic turn earns you the most bonus points.
To be sure, it's only slightly less punishing than the prior two games (each level now has checkpoints, though continues have to be earned by high score), but here the pixel-chaos feels more managable and more legible than the at-times-haphazard fake-out dot-flinging that preceded it, and the reward of its synaesthetic light/music show has always out-shined the abuse it's doled out so freely.
I branded myself, about 8 years ago, with a cookie cutter and a blowtorch. The first time my dad saw it, he asked if someone had held me down and mutilated me in some kind of gangland reprisal. Dad thinks my life is a lot more exciting than it actually is.
Anyhoo, Cory just boinged this link to the Shapeways blog, wherein is described a nifty little 3D-printed metal branding iron they've developed, which clicks onto a standard disposable butane lighter and is fully customizable with your own logo/gang sign/frat house letters. Click the iron in place, flick the Bic for 30 seconds, and you're ready to burn some skin!
If you don't enjoy the smell of your own curdled flesh, this could be a great tool for hallmarking those little handmade wooden widgets you sell on Etsy, or whatever.
[via Boing Boing]
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If you have an Archos 5 tablet and are interested in accessing all the wonderful apps available on the Android Market, jkkmobile has step-by-step instructions. [via jkkmobile]
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NBR's performance since the subscription wall was built (via O'Reilly Radar)
More than 30 signatories, including Gordon Roddick, who founded the Body Shop with his late wife Anita, leading green campaigner Tony Juniper and Rev Ian Galloway, convenor of the Church of Scotland, take the government to task for failing to push RBS and the other bailed-out banks into supporting socially useful investments.Celebrities, MPs and clergy urge government to rein in RBSIn their letter, written to mark the first anniversary of the British taxpayer becoming its largest shareholder, they call on Darling to transform RBS into the "Royal Bank of Sustainability".
The strongly-worded communication criticises the Treasury for standing on the sidelines while RBS took a controversial decision to support US foods group Kraft in its bid for chocolate maker Cadbury, despite the fact the bid will put jobs at risk and therefore work against the interests of the UK taxpayer. The bank's conduct has also raised eyebrows in the City because it breached protocol by neglecting to inform Cadbury of its planned defection to the Kraft camp, despite having a decades-long relationship with the confectioner.
If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay: How to Know if Your Child's Injury or Illness Is Really an Emergency (Lara Zibners):
Apart from a terrific title, the book has plenty going for it. Basically, Even if Your Kid Eats This Book is a detailed guide to everything you don't have to worry about. It has an orifice-by-orifice guide to detecting and removing Lego! A list of things under the sink that won't poison your kid! Sensible advice about how to get rid of dry skin! (Hot bath, then anything greasy from Crisco to Vaseline, then time).
Full review | Purchase
Reset: How This
Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America In 96 pages,
Kurt Andersen describes the United States' previous boom and bust
cycles and explains why the bust cycles are essential for innovation
and improvement of living standards for everyone. Times of crisis, he
says, open new opportunities for making positive changes.
Full
review | Purchase
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (David Kessler):
Kessler delves into the psychology and neuroscience of our junk-food cravings, seeking an explanation to the conundrum of the person whose "will-power" is strong on many fronts, but who finds it hard to resist unhealthy foods (I class myself among those people). He concludes that we're extremely susceptible to reward-conditioning when the reward consists of foods that combine fat, sugar and salt, and that the food industry has evolved to deliver extremely efficient, super-sized portions of fat-sugar-salt bombs in a variety of satisfying textures and presentations.
Full review | Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/masonic-myth-tb.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Masonic Myth:
Unlocking the Truth About the Symbols, the Secret Rites, and the
History of Freemasonry
In the introduction to The Mason Myth, Kinney (a Mason himself) wrote
that he wanted his book to be an antidote to both the "imaginative
speculations of 'alternative historians,'" and to those Masonic
histories that "succumb to the tyranny of minutiae, where a
never-ending stream of names, dates, jargon, and organizational
details numb the brains of all but the most dedicated reader." In my
opinion, he succeeds in both counts, having written a book that's both
highly-readable and down-to-earth.
Full
review | <a
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Twelve Hours' Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old: A Step-by-Step Plan for Baby Sleep Success (Suzy Giordano):
It takes about an hour to read and does not involve doing anything horrible to your kid like letting her cry all night. Basic method: for the first 8 weeks, keep track of when the kid feeds and sleeps. At 8 weeks, use this to come up with a sleep and feed schedule that more or less fits the rhythm she's falling into. Gently encourage her to stick to it (e.g., if she's hungry before mealtime, see if you can distract her for a few minutes [the first day], then a few minutes more [the next].)
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/get-high-now-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Get High Now Without
Drugs : Over 175 sensory trips and tricks for visual stimulation,
compressing time, lucid dreaming, mediation, and more
examines hypnagogic induction, theta wave brain synchronization tapes,
isolation tanks, ingesting the blood of schizophrenics, Transcendental
meditation, lucid dreaming, Yucatecan trance induction beats, binaural
beats, isolation tanks, kundalina transcendent, chanting, lucid
dreaming, mud sleep induction, risset rhythm, shepard tones, Sudarshan
Kriya, thalassotherapy, and more
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811867137/boingboing">Purchase
The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt):
Hunt's book is a lot shorter on theory and manifesto than Cluetrain and a lot longer on practicalities, devoting a lot of space to explaining how all these tools work and citing examples of different commercial and charitable organizations that have used them to good effect (as well as citing cautionary examples of companies that bungled things badly, usually by being caught out in deceit of one kind or another). Because of this, Whuffie Factor is probably easier to put into effect as soon as you crack the cover, but it's also likely to go stale more quickly, as the specific technologies cited wane (Cluetrain may have pre-dated blogging, but it had enough theory-stuff that it's still worth reading today, ten years later). On the other hand, if Hunt's book does well, she'll have a nice side-line in producing annual updated editions.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/boy-wind-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Boy Who
Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
A 14-year-old boy in Africa builds an electricity generating windmill
out of scrap. With so many tales of bloody hopelessness coming out of
Africa, this reads like a novel with a happy ending, even though it's
just the beginning for this remarkable young man, now 21 years old. I
have no doubt that William--who is rapidly becoming a symbol of promise
and possibility for the people of Africa--will be leading the way.
Full
review | <a
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Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip (Nevin Martell):
For ten years, between 1985 and 1995, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world's most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/wicked-plants-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Wicked Plants: The
Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical
Atrocities
"It's an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise
offend. You'll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs),
which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that
ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like
the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother)."
Full
review | <a
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How We Decide (Jonah Lehrer):
Lehrer, author of the celebrated Proust Was a Neuroscientist, lays out the current state of the neuroscientific research into decision-making with a series of gripping anaecdotes followed by reviews of the literature and interviews with the researchers responsible for it.
Full review | Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/depression-2-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Depression 2.0:
Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times is a practical,
empowering, hands-on guide to persevering and even thriving in the
event of an economic crisis. Placing particular emphasis on
self-sufficiency and personal resilience, this timely, informative
book offers a hopeful way forward in a time of great uncertainty.
Bankruptcy, barter, and survival investing are just a few of the
important topics explored.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934170062/boingboing">Purchase
Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry (Lenore Skenazy):
David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has discovered pedophiles don't want to waste their time just flipping through MySpace pages or Facebook pages. It's as futile as trying to call up random numbers from the phonebook and trying to get a date. It's just a waste of time.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/best-iphone-apps-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Best iPhone Apps:
The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders I had a blast
browsing through this full-color, 228-page book about the very best
iPhone applications. I only knew about 25% of the titles recommended
by author Josh Clark, who tested thousand of apps to pick his 200
favorite work and leisure related titles.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059680427X/boingboing">Purchase
Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery (Annika Sanders and Kerry Seager):
The second section is a detailed HOWTO for recreating several of their basic garments: a suit-sleeve scarf, a "shirt wrap halter top," a "fly top" and others, with copious notes about shopping for clothes to rescue and repurpose, instructions for unpicking seams, a glossary of textile types and strategies for working with each and so on.
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/astonish-yourself-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Astonish Yourself:
101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life 101 mental
and perceptual exercises you can perform on yourself. In his
introduction, Droit says the purpose of the experiments is to "provoke
tiny moments of awareness," and to "shake a certainty we had taken for
granted: our own identity, say, or the stability of the outside world,
or even the meanings of words." Most of the experiments require about
20 minutes to complete, and often involve nothing more than merely
thinking about something.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142003131/boingboing">Purchase
Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Kenny Shopsin):
Kenny Shopsin's restaurant began life as a grocery store, purchased for $25,000 by his father for his peripatetic son (Shopsin describes himself then as a neurotic who saw a therapist five days a week). In the grocery store, Shopsin found a kind of frenetic peace in cultivating and deepening his relationship with his customers (one of whom, Eve, he married). Gradually, he added prepared food to the grocery lineup, then more and more, as the satisfaction of cooking for others seized his interest, until the grocery store became a restaurant.
Shopsin's memoir is like the man: loud, opinionated, warm, exuberant and absolutely delightful. He had me when he revealed that he'd named one of his dishes solely to piss off Andrea Dworkin ("she's probably never heard of this dish").
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/the-math-book-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Math Book: From
Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of
Mathematics Mathematics, as presented by Clifford Pickover,
is a palace filled with awe-inspiring curiosities. His latest is a
500-page, full-color tour of mathematical highlights from 150 Million
B.C. to 2007.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1402757964/boingboing">Purchase
World of Warcraft and Philosophy (Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger):
This collection of essays and short fiction addresses the ethics, economics, and metaphysics of Azeroth and its inhabitants.
Full review | Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/wild-fermentation-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Wild Fermentation:
The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture FoodsThis
book shows you how to make a wide variety of fermented foods: beer,
wine, mead, miso, tempeh, sourdough bread, yogurt, cheese, and other
more exotic foods.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931498237/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/getting-arduino-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Getting Started with
Arduino Written by Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino.
It's only 116-pages long and uses attractive hand-drawn illustrations
to get even the most clueless newbie up to speed. Filled with
easy-to-understand examples and projects
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596155514/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/sew-darn-cute-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Sew Darn Cute: 30
Sweet & Simple Projects to Sew & Embellish Jenny's whimsical
aesthetic sensibility really resonates with me: surprising and
appealing color combinations, rounded simple geometry, mixing patterns
with solids, pleasing textures, and designs that reveal their process
of construction. Her creations are the masterful result of many years
of dedication, study, experimentation, and creativity.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312383835/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/iphone-fully-loaded-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">iPhone Fully
Loaded shows you how to load (hence the title) your phone
with songs, podcasts, videos, comic books, blogs, applications,
photos, spreadsheets, databases and other types of media. I learned
something new in every chapter. The way author Andy Ihnatko uses smart
playlists in iTunes is pure genius, and it's the first thing I put
into practice. His advice on ripping DVDs into movies is the best I've
read, and I'm looking forward to trying his method of converting web
sites, email, and documents into spoken text.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470173688/boingboing/">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/sexology-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Best of
Sexology: Kinky and Kooky Excerpts from America's First Sex
Magazine collects the wackiest and most unintentionally funny
articles from America's first sex magazine, Sexology, The Illustrated
Magazine of Sex Science. "Homosexual Chickens", "Adolph Hitler's Sex
Life", "Sex and Satan", "Twin Beds or Single?", "Sexual Tattooing",
"When Midgets Marry" are just a few of the subjects covered...or
should I say uncovered?
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076243323X/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/show-me-how-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Show Me How: 500
Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the
Exotic My 5-year-old daughter and I quickly paged through
this book filled with cartoon-like project ideas and made a list of
things to do: grow an avocado tree from a seed, invent clay oddities,
assemble a super slingshot, tell time with a potato clock, blow a
humongous bubble, make a delicious s'more, and about 20 other
things.
Full
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href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061662577/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/sex-lives-of-famous-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Intimate Sex
Lives of Famous People This 600-page illicit encyclopedia of
the private lives of writers, politicians, athletes, popes,
rabble-rousers, composers, rock stars and sex symbols has been revised
and enlarged, with a dozen new entries, including ones on Kurt Cobain,
Malcolm X, Wilt Chamberlain, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison, Nico, Aleister
Crowley, and more.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932595295/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/macrophenomenal-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">FreeDarko presents
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars
in Today's Game An idiosyncratic, highly personal take on
professional basketball. The illustrations and overall design are
stunning.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596915617/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/leibovitz-at-work-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Annie Leibovitz at
Work is not only a gossip lover's delight (she tells fun
stories about all the famous people she'd photographed, like Hunter S.
Thompson, The Rolling Stones, Queen Elizabeth, and Al Sharpton), its
also an inspiration for anyone who does creative work and wants to
continuously challenge themselves to become better at their craft.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375505105/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/kick-litter-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Kick Litter:
Nine-Step Program for Recovering Litter Addicts The training
method is so simple that it is explained in two pages. The rest of the
book consists of photos of the author's cats and cutesy captions of
what the cats "think" about the method. The book's cover jacket is an
instructional poster you can remove and unfold, and contains
everything you need to know to try this method.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974658278/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/urban-homestead-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">The Urban Homestead:
Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, is a delightfully readable and very
useful guide to front- and back-yard vegetable gardening, food
foraging, food preserving, chicken keeping, and other useful skills
for anyone interested in taking a more active role in growing and
preparing the food they eat. I learned a great deal about composting,
self-watering containers, mulching, raised bed gardens, vermiculture
(worm composting), and raising chickens by reading this info-dense
book.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934170011/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/iphone-hacks-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">iPhone Hacks:
Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits "You
can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more.
Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and
create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and
unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to
video game emulators."
Full
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href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596516649/boingboing">Purchase
<img
src="http://boingboing.net/images/shop-class-xm.jpg"
width="100" height="100" align="left">Shop Class as
Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Matthew B.
Crawford's book is about the the importance of using your hands to
make and repair things. He compares the kind of life many people in
developed countries lead -- inside cubicles, working on things that
are several levels removed from the physical world -- to a life of
skilled labor that requires ingenuity and experience, and provides the
kinds of challenges that human beings were made to relish.
Full
review | <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594202230/boingboing">Purchase
Other installments:
Part Six: Comix, Art Books, etc
The coconut is nature's Altoid tin. If there was one accessory that could drastically improve the coconut it would have to be the zipper. On Lamu Island, off the coast of Kenya, it would appear that they've developed a decent trade around this concept. [via AfriGadget]
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Almost everyone has heard of a chemistry set. But until the Physics workshop kit was introduced, a physics set was almost unheard of. Physics is an essential science for everyone, and this kit provides a comprehensive explanation of mechanical physics. You will learn the fundamental laws of mechanical physics through building 36 models and conducting experiments. The kit includes more than 300 building pieces and a full-color 64-page manual.
John sez, "Batman: Year 100 creator Paul Pope illustrated three Japanese concept cars for GQ, as well as a flying car of his own design. You can see all the illustrations at the GQ link."Superpunch's gallery of photos of the actual cars
(Thanks, John!)
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Last week, I had far, far too much of several good things. Turkey, stuffing, green beans, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn, biscuits, gravy, cranberry sauce, green Jell-o salad and pie. "Uff-da," as my father-in-law says. Taken in moderation, these foods provide healthy sustenance. (OK, maybe not the sweet potatoes. Or the Jell-o salad.) Taken in excess, they meant antacids and me, bemoaning the terrible mistakes I had made.
The ecosystem in the Mississippi Delta is a lot like me at Thanksgiving, according to Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Granted, that wasn't the exact analogy she used when I saw her speak at the 2009 Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. But the comparison is apt. Rabalais studies the effects of nitrogen and phosphorus on the Delta's aquatic life.
Taken in moderation, she said, those nutrients help make fish fat and happy. Taken in excess, the fish are left in far worse shape than I was last Thursday night. Of course, unlike my holiday overeating, the fish have no control over whether their servings of nutrients are sane or gluttonous. The fish suffer, but we're responsible for the terrible mistake...
Technically, Rabalais said, nitrogen and phosphorous are good things. Without them, you don't get life. In fact, a little extra nitrogen and phosphorous actually improve fishy existence, by plumping up the plankton population. Plankton feed on nutrients, fish feed on plankton and people serve the fish up in a nice butter sauce.
Those nutrients are also food for plants. In fact, that's a big part of why we get excess nitrogen and phosphorous in the water system to begin with, because both are used as fertilizer on American farms. For example, in 2007, American corn farmers used more than 5 million tons of nitrogenous fertilizer.
But, while corn may have big appetite for plant food, but it's about as efficient at "eating" as a toddler with a bowl of spaghetti. You know the kid will wear as much food as she eats. And a corn field will often use as little as half the fertilizer it's fed. The rest just sits on the soil until it's washed away into the nearest creek by rain or irrigation. Several river systems and thousands of miles away, the Mississippi Delta vomits out water saturated with the nitrogen runoff of every corn farm in the Midwest. In the Gulf of Mexico, the nitrogen becomes a buffet for another plant--algae--which, in the sort of natural cycle that completely fails to inspire Disney song writers, first cut off light needed by underwater plants and animals and eventually die off in numbers so large that their decomposition consumes every drop of available oxygen, suffocating aquatic life for miles around. It's the Circle of Death. And it doesn't make a great musical number.
The kind of total hypoxia event that leads to a mass fish kill doesn't happen very often, Rabalais said, but the destruction doesn't have to be that vast and noticeable to still be a serious problem. Even if oxygen levels just drop a little bit, that can affect which types of fish and other marine life can live in which areas. Some will die, some will swim away...but, either way, ecosystems, human fishing businesses and food supplies suffer.
Fixing the problem is a lot harder than defining it. So many factors contribute. It's not just that the Mississippi water system happens to flow through America's agricultural heartland, or that the nitrogen load released at the Delta has tripled in the last 25 years...it's also the fact that we need to keep the big River from flooding. Historically, the River could dump some of its nitrogen load back on the land before it reached the sea. Now it's more or less firmly channeled in a way that keeps nitrogen in the water.
It's no longer a natural river," Rabalais said in her lecture. "And we've taken away natural sinks in the landscape like forests and prairies that fix nitrogen with their thick root structures. We've changed the watershed from a landscape that can absorb nutrients to a landscape that has too many nutrients put on it."
Rabalais' team has been able to document the increase in nutrients in the Gulf, but they don't have a clear way of dealing with it yet. There have been some initiatives aimed at reducing the nutrient load by reducing fertilizer runoff, she said, but most are purely voluntary and, by her account, haven't really accomplished much. This is an awkward place to leave a lecture (or a story), but Rabalais said that one of the most important things right now is making sure people are actually aware of the problem, so that they take it into account. Case in point, she said, at the same time the federal government was working with her organization to promote voluntary fertilizer-reduction initiatives, it was also pushing (via financial incentives) fertilizer-intensive corn ethanol. We may not know how to fix this problem, but we do know what doesn't work.
Watch Nancy Rabalais' 2009 Nobel Conference Lecture
Read more about hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico
The image used in this story is from an actual hypoxia event, in a river in New Bern, North Carolina. Photographer BLW Photography says, "They littered the banks of the river, the steps at the park from where the water rose, and were on the surface of the river as far as you could see. Very disturbing." Used via CC.
From Etsy seller SteamedGlass. The one pictured has already sold. [via Boing Boing]
More: Lightbulb terraria
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We know that people fall in love with their robots, and that's a fine thing, and we know the Keepon is particularly designed to create emotional bonds. But Keepon meatballs? Keepon broccoli? Hey, whatever floats your boat. I DO love the art of Bento, ever since I edited the Bento Box piece for our Best of Instructables book. One of these days, I'll get around to trying my hand at it.
In the Maker Shed:
The Best of Instructables Volume I The Instructables staff, the editors of MAKE, and the Instructables community itself put together this collection of the best food, home and garden, technology, science, and crafts how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables includes full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and build techniques you won't find anywhere else. Over 300 pages!
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With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications."Sony still subsidizing US military supercomputer efforts" (Ars Technica, thanks Rob Rader!)
